very
low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group
and the most distant group on the other side of us. In other words, she
sat as far away from everybody present as the necessarily restricted
area of the quarter-deck permitted.

Hilda glanced at me and smiled. I snatched a quick look at the lady
again. She was dressed with an amount of care and a smartness of detail
that seemed somewhat uncalled for on the Indian Ocean. A cruise on a P.
and O. steamer is not a garden party. Her chair was most luxurious, and
had her name painted on it, back and front, in very large letters, with
undue obtrusiveness. I read it from where I sat, "Lady Meadowcroft."

The owner of the chair was tolerably young, not bad looking, and most
expensively attired. Her face had a certain vacant, languid, half
ennuyee air which I have learned to associate with women of the
nouveau-riche type--women with small brains and restless minds,
habitually plunged in a vortex of gaiety, and miserable when left for a
passing moment to their own resources.

Hilda rose from her chair, and walked quietly forward towards the bow of
the steamer. I rose, too, and accompanied her. "Well?" she said, with a
faint touch of triumph in her voice when we had got out of earshot.

"Well, what?" I answered, unsuspecting.

"I told you everything turned up at the end!" she said, confidently.
"Look at the lady's nose!"

"It does turn up at the end--certainly," I answered, glancing back at
her. "But I hardly see--"

"Hubert, you are growing dull! You were not so at Nathaniel's.... It
is the lady herself who has turned up, not her nose--though I grant you
THAT turns up too--the lady I require for our tour in India; the not
impossible chaperon."

"Her nose tells you that?"

"Her nose, in part; but her face as a whole, too, her dress, her chair,
her mental attitude to things in general."

"My dear Hilda, you can't mean to tell me you have divined her whole
nature at a glance, by magic!"

"Not wholly at a glance. I saw her come on board, you know--she
transhipped from some other line at Aden as we did, and I have been
watching her ever since. Yes, I think I have unravelled her."

"You have been astonishingly quick!" I cried.

"Perhaps--but then, you see, there is so little to unravel! Some books,
we all know, you must 'chew and digest'; they can only be read slowly;
but some you can glance at, skim, and skip; the mere turning of the
pages te